Icarus

POLICE AT DEAD END IN RESTAURANT MURDERS

The mystery surrounding the death of Caroline Keller and the shooting of her husband, Jack Keller, grows deeper and deeper. Bizarre facts keep emerging but police admitted today that they have had no luck making connections between any of the people, places, or events that seem as if they must be linked. "We're as unsatisfied as the public must be by our conclusions up to this point," said Charlottesville police chief Phil Eagle. "But, unfortunately, the trail we've been following is as cold as an icebox. While we are confident that there will eventually be a break in the case, and while we will continue to pursue every avenue, at the moment we have no new leads and nothing on which to speculate, either publicly or privately." The events to which Chief Eagle refers began on April 1 at a gala opening-night dinner at Jack's restaurant in Charlottesville…

As he read, Jack began to drift. It was no longer necessary to read every word. He knew it by heart.

The article, yet again, recounted the details of the opening and the fight between the customer Raymond Kutchler and his guest. It talked about the police arriving, too late to break up the fight, and then hearing a crash, rushing outside to find Caroline's body on the brick patio… The cops charging upstairs to find Jack… It said that Caroline's valuable diamond necklace was missing and presumed stolen… The murder of the two men in the car in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot…

This story confirmed the identity of the men in the car as Kutchler and his guest. But it also revealed that Kutchler was a pseudonym. The man's real name was Robert Haywood; his dinner companion, and fellow murder victim, was Trent Neufield. And they were boys, really. Students and members of the football team at Virginia State University.

Jack remembered the police coming to him, trying to find any link between him and Caroline and the two students. They found none, direct or otherwise. They could not figure out why the pseudonyms were used. Or why they'd received the invitation. And, ultimately, they could not solve the final piece of the puzzle, either – why were Haywood and Neufield murdered? What was their connection to the robbery and its violent aftermath?

All that was included in the article. But there was more to it than the newspaper reported. There always was, of course.

At first, Jack himself had been a suspect. While he was still loaded with painkillers – and thus, he guessed, more susceptible to telling the truth – the police had tried to find some kind of motive for him to murder his wife. Over doctors' objections, they grilled him about his story, making him repeat details and observations over and over again. They questioned him about his relationship with Caroline, asked him if he'd ever had an affair. He realized he must have been susceptible because he told them that he had, which was true. A brief one, years earlier, when he'd been in London. The woman's name was Emma and she was English, and he hadn't seen her in years. He'd barely seen her even when they'd had their fling, which was all it was. Brief and meaningless and long, long over. Thinking about touching another woman, when he knew that he could never touch Caroline again, made him weep, and the police realized they'd stepped over the line, so they left him alone and never again questioned him about his marriage.

When he was well enough, Jack must have spent fifty hours talking to more cops and, eventually, to private detectives, trying to piece together what had really happened. He even hired an ex-FBI agent who'd written two bestselling books about his cases. They all had the same theories. And none of them could link those theories to any facts.

They were all certain there was a connection between the Haywood-Neufield fight and the shooting in the office. It was a common robbery ploy, Jack learned. Start a distraction, draw everyone's attention away from the real target, and then move in on that target. The target that night had obviously been Caroline. Or possibly Caroline's necklace. And there was the first missing fact: no tie could be found between anyone who had known about the necklace and the robbery/shooting. Jack had shown Caroline's mother his gift and she, in turn, had told both of her other daughters about it. None of them was at the opening, though. Caroline's mother was suffering from terrible arthritis and did not feel up to sitting through a dinner. Llewellyn was on a family vacation with her husband and children. Susanna Rae, staying, as always, in character, simply responded with a "not attending" and never showed up. All were officially ruled out as suspects almost immediately. For several days – a period Jack chalked up to his delirium – his mind kept coming back to Susanna. But when he was more rooted in reality, he realized that as bitter and unpleasant as she was capable of being, she was not capable of being involved in something this horrendous. Several staff members had been told about the necklace moments before the evening officially began – Caroline had shown the jewelry proudly when she went downstairs – but all investigations there were dead ends. The idea of this as an inside job was eventually dismissed and Jack believed that was the correct decision.

No one could establish a connection between the two students and the unknown shooter. Nor could anyone find any link to "Raymond Kutchler" and anyone at the restaurant. Caroline had been in charge of the final invitation list – she had taken suggestions from everyone ranging from Jack to the restaurant managers to the local Chamber of Commerce, but ultimately the list was hers. When it had been time to send out the formal invitations, she'd given the restaurant secretary several sheets of yellow legal paper with handwritten names and addresses on it. Kutchler's name and address were on it – "Raymond Kutchler plus Guest" – written in Caroline's perfect and careful scrawl. The address checked out as false, and so there was another missing fact: How had Kutchler/Haywood received his invitation if not through the mail?

The assumption was that Kutchler/Haywood and Neufield had been killed by the same person who'd murdered Caroline and shot Jack, but again no leads emerged from this probe. No one who knew the two dead men could come up with even a remote idea about how they'd gotten invited to the opening. Not one person who knew them could envision any connection at all to the Kellers or anyone who worked in the restaurant.

Although all investigators assumed the killer was a man, at some point Jack realized that he could not even say that for certain. Due to the deep concussion he'd received as soon as he'd entered the office, the voices he'd heard were distant and dreamlike – in retrospect many of the words were gibberish – and of no distinct gender.

So here was the most crucial missing fact of all: Who was the third person in the office that night? Who had put three bullets into Jack and one fatal bullet into his wife?

And why was Caroline thrown out the window after she'd been shot? Police, as well as Jack's private investigators, dismissed any real connection to Joan Keller's death. One cop claimed it was an unfortunate coincidence. One theorized that the murderer might have known about Jack's mother's death and gone the copycat route.

Jack knew better, though. He knew it was the uprising of the ghosts.

There were so many unknowns. And only one thing that could not be questioned: Lives had changed. Been ruined. Ended.

There was one more news story for Jack to read before he went inside. It was in the business section of that morning's New York Times. He'd already read it once. After the first paragraph, it was just a rehash of the shooting and the fact that the suspect was never found, as well as an update on Jack's recovery. He had no need to read that material again; the Times reporting was not as detailed or accurate as the local Virginia paper. But he did read the first few paragraphs again. He wanted the quick hit of reality that the words gave him.

From page D1 of the Business Section of the

New York Times, September 25: